The Daily Zeitgeist - Upending Our Understanding Of Human History 03.19.24

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

In episode 1643, Jack and Miles are joined by author, archaeologist, and Professor of Comparative Archaeology, Professor David Wengrow, to discuss him and David Graeber's book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity and more!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me for I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me for I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just

starting your career. That's where we come in. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports.

Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. Every great player needs a foil. I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Listen to the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese on the iHeart on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you

get your podcast presented by capital one founding partner of iheart women's sports hello the internet and welcome to season 330 episode two of their daily zeitgeist day production of iheart radio this is a podcast where we take a deep dive into America's shared consciousness. It's Tuesday, March 19th, 2024. It's like our 2000th episode. I don't know how many episodes we have. Like thousands of episodes. And it's finally, it's all worth it, baby. We got to have the author, the co-author of one of my favorite books on this episode, Miles.

Yep. Bill Larson from Calvin and Hobbes fame. Folks. No, I mean, I'll say for a second. David Wengro. Sorry. Yeah. Professor David Wengro. Yeah. I mean, we are at this point, we're just going to dive into the interview that we did with him. Really just a fantastic discussion. Oh, thank you, Justin. Man, I'm sorry. 1,642 episodes. 1,642. A great year.

Look at us now. Columbus sailed nowhere. He was dead. Yeah, he was dead. But yeah. Yeah, I mean, so this is the author of The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity that I talk about a lot on this show. It's basically an archaeological look at prehistoric societies that finds that they're more complicated. They have these complex civilizations and interactions and social structures and that we just have there's

we're sitting on a fucking gold mine of philosophy and history and all political science from all of these civilizations that have just been ignored up till now and so a big part of this book that we don't i think explicitly state in the interview is that the reason this book is possible is because over the past like 30 years there has just been an outpouring of discoveries of what these various quote-unquote prehistoric civilizations lived like. And we're finding these massive works of art or like ceremonial grounds that are like, you can only truly appreciate them from an airplane. They're so vast and beautiful and impressive. And we're better understanding these accounts of Native American thinkers and philosophers who met, you know, Jesuit priests and Jesuit, like, settlers and basically, you know, ran

circles around them. And so there's all of these amazing thoughts that we could be benefiting from. And instead, they're kind of getting deleted from the record by public education yes but also like the most popular like that book sapiens stephen pinker's better angels of our nature guns germs and steel like these popular books about history that are not written by archaeologists or people who are like actually looking at the evidence so that's what i find so exciting about the book is just like what we have a current system that we are stuck in and we think it's the only possible option and instead we have this rich history that we are ignoring. The book is full of examples of just various civilizations,

massive cities that were governed from the bottom up. So it's a great book to just go to for inspiration when we talk about our inability to imagine the end of capitalism or what a different organization for society would look like this is a great place to like feed your imagination well and also helps to understand what that sort of like how why it's difficult to break the inertia of being able to be like is there something different because there's just so much momentum of this like linear version of how civilizations came to evolve and like you think like i just think about the literal

game civilization by sid meyers yeah and how linear it is like well you need pottery to get admiral husbandry to get mining and then sailing and then cartography and then money and because of that it completely distorts our understanding of how anything has evolved rather than this like inevitable arc of like sort of sequence of events that leads us to a place that there's actually so much more. There was so much more freedom about how these prior civilizations existed and played with different ideas. And yet we find ourselves stuck in an era where like, well, this can only be it. Right. This is like peak thought. And yeah, this is all this is our only option

and it's it that is the result that mindset the mindset where we can't picture anything else is the result of a very consistent series of myths and lies that we've been telling ourselves through like histories that are written and kind of cohere to myths. Like they point out that like a lot of these founding myths kind of also cohere to like biblical, like creation myths. Like they're all kind. So anyways, it's,

it's a fascinating book. It was a really fascinating conversation. It's a paradigm shifter. Tell me that. Yeah. So that, that is this, this is our conversation with Professor David Weber. It's called The Dawn of Everything,

A New History of Humanity. It's an international bestseller. It's really a must-read. Talk about a lot on this show. Yep. I read it by just for sheer repetition of you talking about it so much. So yes, and I'm glad I did. Well, please welcome Professor David Wengro! David! Thank you so much, guys. Thank you. I just want to make a quick disclaimer.

You know, I wrote all the really bad bits. The bad stuff. Okay. We'll only ask you about the bad parts. Yeah. So I guess our first question, what's the worst part of the book? Just kidding. Oh, yeah.

That's a really good question. What is the worst part? No. So, I mean, I just want to jump right into it because we only have you for a limited Oh, yeah, that's a really good question. What is the worst part? at least how I did based on a public school education understanding of history. And the version that I had learned from public school and then from a lot of these popular nonfiction books like Guns, Germs, and Steel, Better Angels of Our Nature, you know, Sapiens. The version I learned is that our current system is the result of a sort of inevitable linear civilizational evolution and this is this is just what you're stuck with and that's it and those books are written by the way by people who aren't archaeologists

and anthropologists like yourselves but what what does the actual archaeological record tell us? The first thing I would say is that I think all human societies do this to some degree. It's not just those of us educated in, let's say, a broadly European tradition. All human societies tell themselves stories about how they came to be. Call it myth, mythology, if you like. We're not unique in that. It's a very human thing to do. And sometimes we reflect more carefully than others about what those stories really are

and what we're putting in the minds of our kids, you know, almost from the age that they can even receive such information. And it so happens that the story we, by which I do now mean those of us educated in broadly European traditions, have been telling ourselves for a very long time, probably more than two centuries now, hasn't actually changed very much. It starts off with people living in these tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, wandering around the landscape. There's no private property, so everything is very equal and egalitarian. And then comes fall from grace. It's almost a biblical story or a story with biblical echoes. We start off in the

Garden of Eden, and then there is that fateful moment when somebody somewhere invents agriculture. And this is the great transition that changes everything about how we relate to each other. Suddenly you have private property, and you can support larger populations. So cities emerge, and once you have cities, you've got to have some kind of central government to keep order. Otherwise, everything is going to fall into chaos. Then you get the origins of the state. And by the time you get to our present world, which is, of course, divided up from one end to the other into nation-states, there's this sense that somehow it was all kind of inevitable. All the key moves in the game

were made so long ago. We're talking about not even thousands, but tens of thousands of years ago. The most we can do these days is kind of tinker around the edges of what we have, but that essentially there is no other game in town. So we grew up in nation-states, which, as we argue in the book, are actually politically really quite weird and unusual structures. They combine, if you like, three basic forms of power into one institution that we refer to as the state. You know, everyone claims to live in a nation state. If you don't make that claim, you're in a very vulnerable position.

You're either a refugee or, you know, in some way in search of an alternative identity. But if you ask people to actually define what that is, what is a state? Could you give me a short definition? Yeah, you would have to think about it. You would have to think about it, which is kind of scary if you think that we live and we grow up within these political frameworks. But actually, what are they? What do they comprise? And generally, if you go to the textbooks, what you get is a definition that looks something like this. A nation-state of the kind that we all grow up in is sovereign. In other words, it commands its territory. It has the legal right to defend its territory and to use violence in order to do so.

So nation states are sovereign and they're inviolable. And if somebody invades your sovereignty, you have the right to go to war. That's one thing. States are complex. They're kind of complex social organisms, so you need some kind of administration or bureaucracy. Somebody has to control knowledge at the center just to kind of keep the wheels turning. Otherwise, it's all going to fall apart. And then we have these things called elections, which are supposed to be the same thing as democracy. Now, as we know, this is not necessarily going the way

that a lot of people imagined democracy would go. Why? What happened? We're not familiar with anything. No, you wouldn't know about this. Yeah, we live in america in in some remote exotic parts of the world you get this weird phenomena where the only people who can be elected are over 100 years old right and it's really strange and they kind of get up on stage and they can barely make it up there and then they give their their kind of cheers and they're dribbling and it's awful stage and they can barely make it up there and then they give their their kind of cheers and they're dribbling and it's awful yeah and they have to have a personality disorder just to get

in the door you have to like have this weird thing where you're like i should be in charge of all of this right of all of it yeah that's right and then it's kind of like a grand sporting occasion and everyone votes for their favorite team and then they basically get to do whatever they like. And yeah, this is what some people have come to know as democracy. And if you put those three things together, I guess you get a rough approximation of the kind of societies we grow up in and the kind of societies that we're educated in.

And of course, like all other societies, because we grow up in those the kind of societies that we're educated in. And of course, like all other societies, because we grow up in those particular frameworks, we have a natural tendency to think of human history the same way, as if it was somehow all leading up to this. And what we're trying to do in our book, me and my friend David Graeber, In the Dawn of Everything, me and my friend David Graeber in The Dawn of Everything is actually show how different things really were from this kind of familiar story. There's really been an incredible flood of new information, I'd say like mainly in the last two or three decades, that throws almost every aspect of that story into disarray i wouldn't even know where to begin you're gonna have to give me some pointers here yeah i mean the i i guess i think one of one

of the most instructive places and i think the a lot of the beginning of the book is taken up talking about some of the like native american civilizations that when when European settlers came to the Americas, there's just been this vast rewriting of what that exchange, what that interaction looked like. And in fact, a lot of these Native American civilizations were miles ahead of the European civilizations they encountered there in terms of values we consider important, like gender rights, environmental justice, democracy. And it required this massive historical effort to just rewrite that history. So it turns them primitive when in fact they were like these thought leaders that were massive contributors to a lot of these European colonial, you know, enlightenment ideas. But just talking about that and then this idea of like we kind of have a natural experiment there, right, where European colonial settlers are coming over and interacting with Native Americans who already live on the east coast of North America.

And we got to see who liked whose version of organizing things better, right? Yeah, I mean, I guess it's important to point out that when we say they were Europeans, they weren't much like you and me. I mean, the Europeans we're talking about were generally either Jesuit missionaries or aristocrats, maybe traders, soldiers of fortune and whatnot. And, you know, certainly the attitudes of the Jesuits to our eyes probably have much less in common with things that you or I might believe about the way society should function and what's actually coming back at them from the local populations. For example, they had terrible difficulty getting the Haudenosaunee and the

Wendat and other First Nations who lived in the eastern part of North America to even consider a religion that was based on these 10 commandments, right? Because those are commandments, and that implies that someone's going to tell you what to do, and you're just going to do it because you've been commanded to do it. This was actually a pretty alien concept in these societies. The idea that you would simply obey unquestioningly the command of another, whether it's a priest or a king or an ancestor, was quite alien to them. And actually, one of the things that Jesuits noticed early on was that there was a connection of sorts between this refusal to obey and the development of something else in

these societies, which was a really sophisticated style of debate and persuasion. They wouldn't have called it democracy at the time, but what they're describing actually looks a lot more like real democracy than what we were just talking about before with our bizarre electoral systems. People sitting around in a plaza, taking time to debate, to make their cases, listening to one another, trying to come up with some kind of workable compromise where you don't end up with one group of people who feel like total losers or suckers, and the others are victorious, which is never going to lead to anything good in the end. All of this comes out of an assumption that nobody's the boss. They used to laugh at Europeans, and this comes through quite a lot in the Jesuit missionary relations, they say, they kind of laugh at Europeans because we have real

chiefs, you know, who must be obeyed. They had chiefs as well called Satchins, but they didn't have that kind of coercive power. If a chief tried to boss people around in that way, people would just laugh at him. They'd make fun of him. They'd say, well, we make fun of our chiefs, and you take yours seriously. So, you know, it's like we may tell ourselves we live in free societies, but you go into work, or almost any other situation that the majority of people find themselves in in their daily lives, and you try and exercise those freedoms and pretty quickly you're going to find yourself out on the street out of the job whatever it may be so as they might have put it you know we have play freedoms and real chiefs whereas those other

people they had real freedoms and kind of play chiefs. And I was always taught that whenever indigenous populations encountered people from Europe, whether they be missionaries or explorers, they immediately said, oh, you know what? The way you live is actually superior. Thank you so much for enlightening us onto that. I'm guessing that was that also the case? They confuse the white people with gods, right? And we're like, oh, they must be gods. And we'll listen to everything they say. And they with gods, right? And we're like, oh, they must be gods and we'll listen to everything they say and they're better, right?

And I'd imagine the Jesuits were like, we can learn nothing from here. I think it certainly came as a shock. And actually, we're still kind of feeling the effects of that enormous shock of actually encountering another world of values. of actually encountering another world of values. You've got to remember European societies until the 18th century had basically known nothing except hierarchy. Pretty much as long as you want to go back, it had been about the authority of the church, the authority of dynastic lineages, kings, queens, princes, courts. And to be confronted with societies where you had women's freedoms, where people could get divorced, where property was actually shared out in some more equitable way, created what one historian referred to as the crisis of the European mind. It's a crisis. You mean we don't have to live like this?

We don't have to be in this world? And so what you get, like you described earlier on, is basically two things going on at the same time. On the one hand, there is an appropriation of some of these values, which today we think of as European values like freedom, democracy, women's rights, all these things we value as progressive values. There is a kind of appropriation of that. But at the same time, there is a backlash by more conservative thinkers, particularly the ones who are arguing that property and trade and material wealth are really how we're going to liberate ourselves from the power of the church and the power of kings. So you end up with what we call in the book the backlash, the myth of progress, the backlash against this indigenous critique of European

civilization, which basically is the story that we started out this conversation with, the one about tiny bands of hunter-gatherers. And yeah, they can have all these freedoms, but it's not because they're ahead of us. It's not because they've progressed farther than us. head of us. It's not because they've progressed farther than us. It's the opposite. It's because they're primitive. And what they mean is primitive in material terms, technologically primitive. Oh, they live in these funny little huts. They don't really wear many clothes. So freedom and democracy and equality become these things that once existed in a kind of natural state. They didn't even have to be created. They were just how people were once upon a time. And then agriculture kind of ruined all of that, and we're into the familiar story. And then supposedly, and this is kind of the last part

of the myth, a small and very select group of white people living in the northwestern part of Europe, kind of reclaimed a little bit. They kind of clawed back a little bit of those lost freedoms through their understanding of the ancient Greeks and Romans who kept slaves, which is obviously a little bit of a paradox. And hence, we end up with these sort of very ambivalent, deeply compromised notions about what democracy is and actually a very low bar for what we think democracy is. Right. Let's take a quick break. We'll come back and keep talking about this. We'll be right back. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series,

Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and LA-based Shekinah Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two decades. Jessica and I will delve into the hidden truths between high-control groups and interview dancers,

church members, and others whose lives and careers have been impacted, just like mine. Through powerful, in-depth interviews with former members and new, chilling firsthand accounts, the series will illuminate untold and extremely necessary perspectives. Forgive Me For I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job, girl, yes. Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan Saner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job

and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it? Like you miss 100% of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career

without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This summer, the nation watched as the Republican nominee for president was the target of two assassination attempts, separated by two months. These events were mirrored nearly 50 years ago when President Gerald Ford faced two attempts on his life in less than three weeks. President Gerald R. Ford came stunningly close to being the victim of an assassin today. And these are the only two times we know of that a woman has tried to assassinate a U.S. president.

One was the protege of infamous cult leader Charles Manson. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right-hand woman. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI in a violent, revolutionary underground. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer. This

is Rip Current. Available now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And yeah, I mean, so, you know, we were talking about European settlers encountering Native American ideals and, you know, by our definition, they were further along. But it seems like they were also further along in terms of like they had, they were constantly

going back and forth between more authoritarian, less authoritarian forms of government. I mean, and there was just this vast kind of galaxy of different ways that societies were organized. So, yeah, this is one of the things we discovered, I guess, in the book that surprised us and kind of intrigued us and actually inspired us to really develop this project is that the whole way we think about humans in societies of the distant past is basically wrong. You know, we begin with these categories, like people were either this or they were that. You know, they were either hunter-gatherers or they were farmers. They were either living in bands or in tribes or in chiefdoms. And actually, what we found in the evidence of our fields in archaeology and anthropology is that this really isn't the case. Actually, most human societies, most of the history of our species, have been kind of playing with the clay. There'll be one

of these things for part of the year. Then they'll switch it around. They might be very hierarchical in their organization for one part of the year. You might have a police force with coercive powers that can whip people or imprison them. But then these powers melt away. And this often has to do with the actual form that human society takes, which is not stable. It fluctuates. People move around with the changing seasons. They change the size of their groups. There'll be times of year when you have a great abundance of meat and other resources.

There'll be other times that are lean. And people have generally adapted their societies to these oscillating conditions. It's like putting a mask on and taking it off, where you don't start off with these purely egalitarian societies. There are always going to be individuals who love power, and there are always going to be individuals who want to be flunkies. That is actually very hard to explain. At another level is individual psychology. But let's assume that there will always be a mixture of people in any human

group, even a family or a household, some of whom tend towards that direction, and some of whom, let's say, are more into the caring and sharing. The question is, what do you do with those people? What kind of institutions do you build? Do you build institutions that are going to raise those ambitious competitive types to the top? Or do you create institutions that are going to level things out? And what we discovered is that actually a huge number of societies on all continents of the world have kind of done both simultaneously. So they will not suppress hierarchy all of the time. You might let it out in some spectacular ritual performance. This is why we get these things in human history that people often regard as mysteries or puzzles.

The kind of things that the makers of certain Netflix series like to call great mysteries of the ancient world. That's not a mystery. Aliens did it, right? Aliens built all those things? I think we all know that. It's all the stuff that aliens built, right? Like Stonehenge and Egypt, where first you start out by sort of characterizing the society as terribly, terribly primitive. And then you say, but look, here is this incredibly mathematically, geometrically sophisticated monument. How could these idiots possibly create something?

The answer is obviously they were not idiots. These are people who could at times create these incredibly impressive cultural creations, but then at other times would actually morph into different forms of society. This is what the anthropologist Marcel Mauss called the double morphology of society. You don't just have one system of law, or one system of religion, or one system of politics. You switch things around. Now, this was kind of a revelation to us, because it changes the whole question. The big question of human history since the days of the Enlightenment, since Jean-Jacques Rousseau and people like that, was about the origins of inequality. How did we lose that original equality and freedom? Whereas actually, starting from the earliest evidence that we can find, you have to ask a

different question. You have to ask not so much what was the origins of inequality, but how did the genie of inequality get out of the bottle? When did those cages come down, the restricted hierarchy, which would always have been there? It's always there. Relations between adults and kids, in relations of gender, in relations of domestic servitude. You know, the idea that we've ever lived in societies of equals is a little bizarre. So the question becomes more about, you know, when did those cages break down? When did things like private property and sovereignty and patriarchy escape from those cages and effectively come to dominate almost every waking moment of our human lives yeah they

didn't like that when we imagine them there's this kind of bias that you identify frequently in the book which is like this idea that like like you just said, those people are idiots. It was primitive, so they didn't have these elaborate systems to keep all of these impulses that today are causing problems for us under control. They couldn't have just, you know, we refused to look back and learn from them because you see that thing the other day one of the authors you mentioned who wrote the sapiens book yeah you've all know a harari i think yeah yeah there was someone sent me a clip of an interview just recently just the other week which went. And I can't remember who it was interviewing, Mr. Harari, but he said this thing that annoyed a lot of people.

It went roughly like this. I hope I'm not misquoting, but he said, I think the interviewer asked him something like, it's often said that, you know, we're living in a time of great uncertainty right now, do you believe that's true? And he started off by saying, well, everyone always says that about the period of history that they live in, but today it's actually true. For the first time in history, we have no idea what to tell our kids. We don't know what technologies are going to be relevant to their lives in 20 years' time. Are you falling for this?

Yeah. Right, I can see you. You're believing me. And then he starts talking about what things were like back in the day, back in the Neolithic period or the Middle Ages. You know, there were certain things you couldn't predict, like when the Vikings or the Mongols were going to come through and raid your settlement. But you knew that you would still be growing wheat and raising sheep. contradict when the Vikings or the Mongols were going to come through and raid your settlement. Sure.

But you knew that you would still be growing wheat and raising sheep in 20 years' time. There were these basic things that you could tell people that you knew were going to be relevant. But today, all of that's gone. We just have no clue what it's going to be, right? Are you buying any of this? No, I probably would have before reading your book but your book does a really good job of dispelling this notion that it's really telling i mean regardless you know even if you haven't read our book the implication is actually kind of

fascinating because it implies that there's no connection between what we teach our kids and what's actually going to happen in the next 20 years right yeah right you know what i mean it's like this idea that you're kind of floating blindly into the future and you can tell your kids any old thing but all that other stuff's going to happen anyway whereas in fact you know this is obviously nonsense. I mean, if we teach our kids, people didn't always raise sheep. They didn't always grow crops. Actually, as we show in the book, these were very conscious processes, which sometimes people actually rejected. You know, they decided they tried it on, they tried it on for size, and they decided to drop it again. So it's partly this idea that actually goes back to people like Rousseau.

So it's partly this idea that actually goes back to people like Rousseau, that we're always kind of floating blindly into these traps, which we're making for ourselves, but we can never quite see them coming. Yeah. apart from being just kind of wrong is actually a pretty dangerous way to look at the world because you know you can kind of put your hands up and say well tell our kids any old rubbish right right yeah and just briefly so russo and hobbes are kind of the two versions we get of that narrative we were talking about earlier with rus, it's like we were living in these happy egalitarian groups, and then we gave it up. It's the Harari, like, sapiens thing, and then we decide to cultivate wheat. I think that's roughly the story. Although, you know, I've got to tell you, Rousseau is way more interesting.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. You know, Rousseau was not about fatalism. Rousseau was not about telling us that there's always going to be this boot stamping on your face and on your kids' faces. Rousseau was about revolution. Rousseau was about, you know, trying to understand what was this liberty that we lost. He just had no clue what that might actually be like. And then Hobbes is on the pinker side. Hobbes is like, before, like, if you think this is bad, you should see what it used to be like.

Man, everybody would just kill each other, and then we had to get these laws to keep people in check, essentially. Yeah, and I think Professor Pinker is very forthright about this. He actually refers to himself as a neo-Hobbesian. Right. And he's like, and if you just look at the record of what it used to be like, you'll see. And then he just like quotes a bunch of like widely debunked bullshit about how violent everything used to be. Yeah, exactly. You get it in politics, you get it in academia. These individuals who present themselves as very rational centrists,

and then you actually look really closely at what they're saying, and it's really out there. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty white supremacist. He just keeps talking about how we were saved by these Enlightenment European thinkers and then erasing the Native American influence from everything. And it's just the story of how we trained ourselves to have better and better manners and that led to lower murder rates if you're not counting world war ii but i yeah i don't want to get too bogged down by pinker but it just i think there's there's just so many examples in the book of these stories that upend this idea that these civilizations were not complex that they weren't trying different things out

that they weren't like there's a i think it's a huron system of beliefs around dreams that you cover in the book it was like really similar to freud's theory but almost more interesting because it like doesn't go in all the weird like yeah i mean the directions we have of this it's called on and dunk and it it goes by way i mean centuries before freud yeah where actually dreams are one of the only contexts in which it does seem like you could have almost the kind of power of command. If you dreamed something, it could be a particular object or a relationship you wish to have. If it came to you in a dream, people almost had to try and make it come true. So we have these descriptions of the winter seasons from the late 17th, early 18th century of Huron societies where people would gather

around and try and make somebody's dream come true. There was a compulsion to do this, and they would do this by interpreting the symbolism of the dream in much the way that Freud was credited with an enormous breakthrough, one of the great intellectual breakthroughs of the 20th century, Freudian psychoanalysis. They have it in their own form. The major difference is that they do it communally. You don't have this notion of the individual therapist and the patient. Society gathers around the individual and supports them in much the same way that you know some of the same kinds of hallucinogenics or psychoactive substances that we tend to if we if we ingest them you know

people do it as largely as individuals yeah would actually have been done in a very communal context with people caressing you supporting you holding your, kind of taking you through it as a group. But I mean, I guess what the example of these dreams and dreamings teaches us is that we'd be very foolish to dismiss those forms of knowledge as somehow alien or exotic. Because actually, you know, we find them within our own culture i feel like that's sort of one of the things that we're so limited because we've dismissed so much of this wisdom or papered it over with sort of like revisionist versions of what had occurred or what things were said and what those ideas were and i think that's why it's really important too because as we as people tend to look at our own systems of oppression as being

fixed and it's like well i don't know what you can do it's just it's just all it was always kind of trending this way i think there's these examples in your book that just show a if we can overcome our sort of perspective of like well these people think this is like old ways man and like they didn't know what they were doing but there are examples i think of you know teotihuacan where you talk about how that is a shift where people saw what was going on with their civilization and actually decided to change it to a completely different system. Can you just sort of kind of talk us through that process? Because I think it's very interesting, especially for us who look at what we're like, sort of these structures we live under now and think, well, I don't know what to do. It is what it is. Yeah. I mean, there seems to be a whole strand of, I guess, what we would call a Republican

tradition or sort of anti-monarchy tradition in the deep history of Mexican societies and especially urban societies, ancient cities. Teotihuacan is one of the earliest and most spectacular manifestations of this. So we're in the Valley of Mexico now, around the time of Christ, so the years 0, 1, whatever. The first few centuries of the Common Era, you get this extraordinary city forming in the Valley of Mexico, with a lot of refugees, it seems, extraordinary city forming in the Valley of Mexico with a lot of refugees, it seems, from surrounding areas. There was a lot of volcanic activity at the time. There was a lot of destruction going on. People flood into this site, and they form a city with hundreds of thousands of residents. And they start doing all the things that Netflix would probably lead you to expect

of an ancient city. They build great pyramids. There's the Pyramid of the Sun, Pyramid of the Moon, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. But then, rather fascinatingly, after a couple of centuries of doing this, they change course in the most dramatic way. They stop building these great monuments, and all of that labor and collective investment that went into creating them goes into something else. And we know what that something else was because archaeologists mapped it in one of the first really great urban surveys done by archaeologists. They found this incredible system of public housing, and it goes in a grid. It's incredibly carefully planned, and it goes in an orthogonal grid from one end of the city to the other. And it houses, as far as we can tell, most of the city's vast multi-ethnic population, multi-ethnic, multilingual, in very comfortable circumstances.

When archaeologists first discovered these kind of communal villas, they actually thought they were palaces. And then they realized that basically everybody is living in a palace. I'm talking about really beautiful plastered walls with mural subfloor drainage systems, maybe four or five nuclear families living in one of these compounds or apartment houses. compounds or apartment houses. And we can reconstruct a diet using the kind of techniques that archaeologists use these days and show that this was an incredibly prosperous site that actually knocked inequality on the head for hundreds of years on an urban scale, which is pretty mind-blowing. Yeah. Yeah. These are the civilizations that we're viewing as primitive, and they've already gone through the process of having this authoritarian setup and then overthrowing it and building a civilization that's bottom-up and running a large city that's bottom-up. seems at Teotihuacan, but nobody has really been able to decipher it. And even if we could, it may not give us the kind of information we would really love, because just imagine the kind of discussions that are going on. Imagine the kind of philosophical discoveries and movements

that would have accompanied a transition like this, which we can only reconstruct from the material remains. Imagine all the intellectual stuff. And actually, we do get some insight into this from a later period when the conquistadors arrive. They actually stumble upon cities that are organized in pretty egalitarian ways. And they describe some of them, including ones with full-blown urban parliaments at a time when you don't really have very much of that going on in Europe. Yeah. Actually, let's take one more quick break. We'll be right back. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series,

Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and LA-based Shekinah Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two decades. Jessica and I will delve into the hidden truths between high-control groups and interview dancers, church members, and others whose lives and careers have been impacted, just like mine. Through powerful, in-depth interviews with former members and new, chilling firsthand accounts, the series will illuminate untold and extremely necessary perspectives. Forgive Me For I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again.

Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions, like how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes. Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions.

Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan Saner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it like you miss 100% of the shots you never take?

Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This summer, the nation watched as the Republican nominee for president was the target of two assassination attempts, separated by two months. These events were mirrored nearly 50 years ago when President Gerald Ford faced two attempts on his life in less than three weeks. President Gerald R. Ford came stunningly close to being the

victim of an assassin today. And these are the only two times we know of that a woman has tried to assassinate a U.S. president. One was the protege of infamous cult leader Charles Manson. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right-hand woman. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI in a violent revolutionary underground. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer. This is Rip Current, available now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. And we're back. And yeah, I think it's interesting. One of the parts of the book, you identify these like key freedoms that people in most civilizations kind of take for granted unless they're otherwise trained into obedience like we are. So there's their freedoms that I never thought about growing up because they just aren't freedoms that are emphasized in our world, but they are a set, like very briefly summarized the freedom to move the freedom to disobey and the freedom to rearrange social ties, which I, you know, come, comes up in that story that you were just telling. But can you talk about those freedoms and how they show up in other civilizations through time and why they would be nice to have for us if we just knew to ask for them?

Yeah, I mean, since you've been so nice about the dawn of everything, a tiny, well, it's not really a scoop, but the reason I've been so busy recently is because I I've decided to try and write another book. Hey, I mean, David and I, David and I never intended the dawn of everything to be a finished project. It was always going to be kind of the introduction or sort of prologue

garment into a whole series that we were planning to do. Amazing. David already got it into his head that it had to be like Tolkien. So the Dawn of everything. Oh, it was just the Hobbit. It doesn't work. I can't wait to see how big the Hobbit is actually a pretty short book. Yeah, that's pretty small.

And everything is more like the two towers. So it was very analogy, but the idea was that we would write three sequels. I don't think that's going to happen without David, but I do want to continue the project in some way. So I'm working on a book called the third freedom. And I want to take forward this, this concept that we came up with of the three basic forms of human freedom that you mentioned,

the freedom to move away, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to kind of play with the social order, flip things around, create a different kind of society. It's one of a number of ideas that we sort of throw out there in the book when we're trying to bring together our observations. Okay, what are the larger conclusions we can draw about all of this? But like all the concepts in the book, it needs more exemplification and more exploration. So what I'm trying to do is understand better the connections between these three freedoms

and how the breakdown of one kind of freedom leads to the breakdown of another kind of freedom. And you can think about this at many different levels, from domestic abuse, you know, if you can't move away, you can't disobey, all the way up to much larger-scale political processes. But I actually want to start off with, if you like, the grandest example of our first freedom, to move away away which is simply the spread of people yeah you know we all we all start off as africans we all start off on the continent of africa nobody seriously today would dispute this actually i was thinking about this the other day because

there's a book that came out recently that says we shouldn't do this archeology stuff. It never leads anywhere good. You know, it's always dangerous. It always plays into some demagoguery or some political mythologies bad. It's thinking, well, that's obviously true sometimes, but if we didn't do this kind of work at all, you know, it was very hard to get people to accept that humans evolved in Africa. There was a lot of resistance to that idea, especially in Europe. People pushed back against it for reasons that were entirely racist. Right.

They didn't want to have African ancestry. These days, almost nobody disputes it. And, you know, that is the result of scientific work in my field. So the idea that this is all a foregone conclusion and whatever stories we come up with are going to lead to disaster, it's a matter of opinion. I don't think it's really the case. But the point is that from Africa, humans disperse. We know these days that you have humans in Australia 60,000 years ago. You have humans in a tiny place called New Ireland, which is in Melanesia, 40,000 years ago, which is long before you have humans in Ireland, as in European Ireland. Yeah.

And this is really the most extraordinary story of human freedoms. But interestingly, it's never told that way. Actually, the standard term in the scientific literature for how humans get around the world in the first place is colonization. We colonize the globe, which is kind of interesting. I mean, it's hardly a neutral term, especially for a field like archaeology, which basically developed as an extension of empire. And it also doesn't make a great deal of sense.

Maybe if you're talking about humans moving into areas where you've got Neanderthals or Denisovans or other human-like species, okay, maybe then you could talk about colonization. But very often we're talking about people moving into land that isn't inhabited by humans at all. And yet we refer to it as colonization. So there's already this mindset that freedom has something to do with conquering or our, or, you know, extending your, your kind of range over somebody else. So I'm actually starting right at the beginning with that question. You know, what if we tried to think about that differently? What if we introduce freedom right at the

beginning of the human story in a very concrete way as the freedom to move away? That third freedom, I think, is so... I'm assuming the third freedom being the one about to be able to rethink what sort of social structures we want to engage in. I think there's a quote in the book that says, How did we get stuck? War, greed, exploitation, and systemic indifference to others' suffering. stuck or greed exploitation and systemic indifference to others suffering if something did go terribly wrong in human history then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence and that feels so much of like what yeah we are so many people are experiencing this like sort of

form of living on the planet in this moment and wondering it's like is this this is the best we can do like so many people like i know there are other ways to do it yet right or just there's just so much historical societal momentum going against this idea and i think yeah it really is right and you know we all have different things we can be doing to push back against that kind of thing and actually try and secure some kind of viable future for our kids and our kids' kids. I guess I share with him the idea that actually rethinking human history on the largest possible scale should be part of any freedom movement, actually. Yeah. Maybe even has to be. on this show about our inability to imagine other systems like that uh kim stanley roberts has said that like it's harder to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world or i'm

misquoting that but basically like people i always thought that was a similar gwen but maybe i'm uh it might be he might be quoting someone else but he like just that idea that when we're asked to imagine anything else, we I think just like that. That's where our zombie movies come from. It's like, yeah, no, it's either this or absolute, absolute hell on the streets. Zombie thinking is a good way to think about this, I think. And history is full of what you might call zombie statistics. Right. Let's just clobber you with numbers. Yeah, let's just keep going on that. You often hear this idea that by the time of the Roman Empire, three quarters of the world's population were living in empires.

Right. Think about that. They were either under the boot of Rome, or they were under the boot of the Han Chinese, or they were under the boot of the Parthians or the Kushans. But whichever way you look at it, most humans on Earth were already kind of domesticated within these incredibly hierarchical structures. That's a zombie statistic. I actually looked at what it's actually based on and it's like, it's way for thin. I'm not gonna, I think I'm going to write about this, so I don't want to spoil the surprise, but let's just say this is basically not you know it's yeah it's got no foundation

really in any solid evidence it's just one of these kind of factoids that gets repeated and repeated so that you know you end up saying something a bit like this you say well oh that's great there were these other people who were experimenting with all these different forms of society, but they were basically on the losing end of history. There were only a few of them. You don't live in the world that they created. We live in the world that Marcus Aurelius created or Emperor Wu or whoever you like.

So come on, get real. This is what we call realism. Internet relations, that has to be about either free trade or war there is no other possibility those are the only ingredients that changes the world yeah yeah i mean there's also parties carnivals festivals that's one of my favorite moments from the book is just talking about that as like ritual you know festivals as like these these places that people could um you write in the book what's really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive they allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible which for some reason like that connected with our modern condition right it's

like actually this could be fun we could be like throwing great parties where we get to i guess like burning man at some point was an example of this and it seems to be even though now like billionaires take their helicopters to burning man and shit like it still seems to be the thing that when i talk to people who've been to Burning Man, they end up coming away from those festivals talking about, oh, it's cool. You like exist in a system outside of money for a week, essentially. But just that idea that like there's been these festivals where that like upend the order and like children get to play at adult jobs or the less powerful get to play the

roles of the powerful is really compelling to me and also just kind of made me slightly hopeful that there could be a way that's enjoyable out of this. This is actually really fascinating, and I think it has a lot to do with where we place the boundaries between what is serious and what is play. Right. So all the things you're describing, I guess,

have been classified in our culture as forms of play. Yeah. In other words, they're not to be taken seriously. Okay, so you experience this other thing for a little while, and now you come back to serious seriousness, like serious reality. This is a shifting boundary. And if you think about the extent to which our supposedly serious politics is actually gamified, there's a lot of play there as well. And where we put the boundaries between seriousness and play,

if you're a historian or an archaeologist and you write a lot about war and violence, people take you really seriously. You're a serious... How many people write about peace? Yeah. Or actually really try and analyze societies that have found ways to be peaceful and to end wars, or design ways out of war so that you can actually envisage mending these social wounds and physical wounds that are being done on each other.

It's amazing how little work there is on these things, because somehow that's not regarded as terribly serious. You're a bit flaky playing around if you study that kind of thing. Yeah. So I think this is really fascinating, and I think it is somehow central in ways that we don't understand very well is the role of play in human culture generally. Yeah. I mean, it seems like it's the one constant. You guys say humans aren't inherently good or evil. They are inherently creative and playful. And that's what you find in the archaeological record throughout your kind of survey in the book.

Yeah, we put things on and we take them off. And the idea that everyone has to be just one thing may turn out to be actually a very radical and very kind of modern idea and actually very untypical. And I think we see this around us all the time, people pushing back against those kind of categories. time here, but where should we send people to find out more about you? Obviously, I'm recommending and continue to recommend everybody read The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity. Where else should people go? Don't send them to my university because I've got way too many students. All right. Yeah, I'll tell them. Yeah, leave him alone, please. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I think they should listen to your show, quite frankly. That's right. Wow. Amazing.

High praise. Thank you so much. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And yeah, we'd love to have you back when the next project is out. Thanks a lot, guys. I'm working on it. All right.

Appreciate it. All right. That was our conversation with professor david wangrow hopefully the first of many uh what a joy go go read the dawn of everything go listen to this show i mean you just heard him say it so yeah that's the most important thing this is like on some genius level shit i knew that and i knew that yeah and i knew that but thank you thank you david for yeah recognizing that miles where can people find you follow you all that good stuff and is there a work of media that you've been enjoying oh man uh you can find me

at miles of gray where they got the ad symbols you like basketball you like what you're seeing in the league or you don't well guess what join jack and i on our basketball podcast miles and jack i'm at Boosties. And also catch me on 420 Day Fiance. We're talking about 90 Day Fiance. Let's see. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The tweet I like is a quote tweet from at Kyle R. Siebel,

who just said, I think about this tweet every single day. And the tweet is from at Wheaton 3000. Michael Wheaton tweeted, At face value value penguin random house is an absolutely insane name for a company that sells anything um yeah hey it's it's what happens when we start throwing companies but yeah where'd you get that oh penguin random house yeah oh your medication? Yeah, yeah. It's cheaper there. Penguin Random House? Oh, shit. He's having an episode. Tweet I'm enjoying. Cat Algarista tweeted, they fucking nailed it when they named it snorkeling, which is

true. Trash Jones tweeted, today I'm perfecting the Irish hello. Prince, he's showing up drunk. And then Mayor Strom tweeted saying saying this guy again at every jesus painting in the louvre everyone hates it you can find me on twitter jack underscore o'brien you can find us on twitter at daily zeitgeist we're at the daily zeitgeist on instagram we have a facebook fan page and website dailyzeitgeist.com where we post our episodes and our footnotes we link off

to the information that we talked about in today's episode in this one we'll probably just link off to the dawn of everything they have an extensive bibliography yeah this book like all great books you know if i wrote a book i would want to be able to use it as a murder weapon. And this is one of those. It is a hefty work. It's a hefter. It's a hefter. Yeah. You could probably kill someone with just the bibliography.

That's how thick it is. It's 63 pages, I think, just the bibliography. Yeah, that's why. So don't step to their sources. Okay? Don't step to the sources. All right. That is going to do it.

Back this afternoon to tell you what is trending. Until then, Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's going to do it. Talk to y'all later. Bye. Third kind of freedom.

I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me for I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me for I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Keri Champion, and this is Season 4 of Naked Sports. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. Every great player needs a foil. I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Listen to the making of a rivalry.

Caitlin Clark versus Angel Reese. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Women's Sports. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadson. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career. That's where we come in.

Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.